Joseph Gordon-Levitt Quotes

I did two commercials, one for Porsche, but I was definitely not the type of child one would cast in a commercial or any TV that you'd typically go out for as a young kid. I wasn't the type of kid who would be in stuff that kids watch. I wasn't cutesy.

We need children to play the parts in movies. I'm just glad it's not my kids.

A lot of child actors keep acting for the wrong reasons.

I cannot stand Hollywood child performances. It just reeks of artifice, and it's weird that, for some reason, Hollywood feels they have to make their child characters smarter than adults, and suddenly kids have the vocabulary of a college grad.

I've played a lot of fathers in my life, and it seems that my kids are getting older and older in films, and I'm always surprised at how good they are.

Acting is about being real, being honest.

People often say that you should never work with child actors. I think that's all wrong. Children have not had the imagination kicked out of them by life experience and adulthood. So, they still are very much alive with that kind of magical thinking which enables an actor to believe they're in these circumstances and make them real to you.

For me, making a lot of dramas on one side it's a different sort of challenge, and on the other, it's not a challenge at all, meaning that my goal is to try and bring the realism and acting you might find in a straight drama with the intentions and conflict, where it doesn't feel tongue-in-cheek, but rather committed and real.

I did an after-school special as my first big thing. It was starring Butterfly McQueen. She was the name. But the real star of it was Robbie Rist, who was that little blond kid who looked like John Denver.

I felt a gravitational pull to the material so that there's a certain element of acting that's not really necessary. I've really liked this in foreign movies before or I've observed others working with them and I've noticed that there's a method that goes on where the actors try and get the children, like the child actor, to interact with them in a real way. It seems like you're the adult trying to get the kid to fall in love with him.

I don't have a formula. Every time an actor wants me to hold their hand, I hold their hand. If they say, "Stay," I say "Okay, respect." You know? "I'm right over here." A kid, if I need to give a line-reading, I'll start acting out the part for the kid and just mimic the kid. You know? Whatever it takes.

I love acting. I just love it. It's in my bones. I remember when I was a kid, I watched an interview with Dennis Hopper talking about Jimmy Dean on the set of Rebel Without A Cause. Jimmy said to him, "If you've got to cry in a scene, you've got to cry. Make it real." And that's all that I believe in.

It's very hard to find a good child actor. There are a lot of child actors out there, especially in America, and they're cute kids, but most child actors appear on sitcoms where their main role is to be cute and make funny little remarks.

You can't be a kid in show business. You will not survive.

I keep my kids out of the whole business entirely. Allegra and Lucas are five and six and I'm not interested in them doing any acting at all. I don't want my kids in show business. I keep them as far away from my work as possible.

I played a lot of moms. You're always too young when you're playing moms. My first kid when I started playing moms was about six months old. And then a month later I was doing another commercial audition and my kid was two, and then about eight months later my kid was 11.

I feel like, when we're kids, you're sold into this fairy tale of what love is. That Prince Charming's gonna come along and save you and you're gonna live happily ever after. They're gonna rescue me from the Bronx, and we're gonna go off and live in a castle somewhere and it's gonna be awesome. He's gonna love me forever, and I'm gonna love him forever, and it's gonna be real easy. And it's so different than that.

Some kids are fine, but often I don't like what I see in child actors. My kids are young and they are already showing an interest, so I have to try to discourage them, squash that in them.

I had a guy who went out of way to help me get started and somehow saw something in me. I couldn't get my hands on a real guitar till I was fourteen. I always wanted one from the time I was a tiny kid. Music was bigger than life to me.

I love Jon Hamm. I'm so lucky to get to work with him and work so closely with him. We have a lot of these scenes that are very intimate, and very tender. Those are the kind of things that an actor lives for. Real moments of connection with other actors.

I'm going to be real as hell and show you who I am, because I want the kids to see who I really am and the basketball players to see who I really am, and that's all that matters to me.

My life is a movie set. These people, they all think this is real, but it's not.

I love trying to play the not-confident guy, the guy against my normal character, because that's when real acting comes into play.

I think you can get away with so much more offensiveness when you're operating behind a stuffed teddy bear or a cartoon or something that's not real, because it's forgiven. It's like having a little kid in a movie curse - it's funny because it's not natural.

It's the same challenge as with any other character, adults or not. You want to take time with the kids. You want to tell them in the audition that they have time to exchange ideas. I'm there. It's not someone else who does the audition, but I don't want to audition a thousand children.